Last night I was watching Avatar and was having a hard time hearing the vocals properly from the center channel. A quick run down of the equipment is 2 M60's v2, 1 vp150 v2, 2 20 year energy speakers used for SL and SR. The reciever I have is a Denon 1508.At first I had the reciever set on Neo DTS 6.1 in Cinema mode and noticed too much mid range causing the vocals to be too muddy. I then changed to Dolby Pro Logic II also in cinema mode. This time the vocals seemed to echo. After a while of messing around with these 2 I tried these in music mode and noticed and increase in clarity from the center channel. Has anyone else experienced this? It was pretty frustrating last night thinking something was wrong with the speakers. Listening to music, I have been fairly pleased with these speakers, but when it comes to movies, I'm having a heck of a time getting things set.

And I wouldn't come to any conclusions based on a single program.Everything (and I mean everything) can differ significantly from one disc to another. I felt the same way about Avatar's dialogue mix, but I'm done w/ changes. I let the unit(s) decide for themselves all the time now. Even then, I've watched the LED readout change it's mind more than once before the downloads were complete.

It was also a drag to have all this new gear and be so disappointed at the recording quality of some of my favorite cd's. The differences within a single artist's catalog can be wild. Everything that we're so eager to have float our boats doesn't always hoist anchor.

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I'm a little confused on which audio to use also. But so far, with a 3.0 system, I get the best sound for movies out of Neo 6 Cinema. For music I use stereo. One other thing I did once was bump up the center channel 1db and that helped. With my current setup, I didn't need that.

I run my receiver in PLIIx all the time. With true 7.1 content it does nothing, with 5.1 it just steers the surround channels around the rears as needed. With 2.0 content it dematrixes the out of phase material to the surrounds and rears, while moving the mono content to the center.

There should be no problem with running PLII all the time, when fed 5.1 content it'll do nothing.

Now, if for some reason you're limited to 2.0 content from your player (how are things connected?) then there will be a difference in the surround processing modes.

So the question becomes, what player do you have, and how is it connected to the receiver?

I found the dialogue in Avatar to be quite good, unfortunately it sounds like a setup issue. I agree with the others about just letting the receiver do its thing with normal Dolby Digital, but Neon has a good point about possible hookup issues.

If we're talking just a DVD player hooked up with optical to the receiver, that will flow DD just fine, in which case you want the receiver in "standard" mode I believe it is called (std button on remote) which will play what is coming from the DVD player without adding any fancy stuff to it.